I've seen a lot of chatter about collectively using box fans to - for example - clear smoke from the #wildfires... heck I've even had that thought! So last night I did some fast math:
a 🧵
I live in Seattle suburbs, so we're just going to focus on WA (sorry OR & CA, you're on your own). WA has an area of 71,362 sq miles. Smoke can rise HIGH, but 2km of air should be plenty to breathe, e.g. earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144658/…
So we need to move... ~1.3e16 cubic feet of air(!)
A typical box fan is rated for 2500 cfm (cubic ft per min), & draws ~100W of power. Under ideal scenarios, that will move an impressive 3.6 Million cubic feet per day! I want this smoke gone, so 1 day is good. That's a gentle to moderate breeze across WA homedepot.com/p/Lasko-20-in-…
So in our simple model, comparing the volume of air over WA to the capacity of 1 fan, we need 3.6 BILLION box fans to clear WA in 1 day. They would draw 5.2e14 W, or (...some very fuzzy math...) about half the power output of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated.
Huh, that seems fairly untenable. WA generates quite a bit of power, 116 TWh of electricity each year. We'd need like... 70days worth of ALL the power in WA to drive those fans for 1 day.
ok ok, box fans are clearly too small. Seattle *is* "Jet City" afterall...What if we use JET ENGINES?! I was very impressed: the engines in a 777 move a whopping 2 MILLION CUBIC FEET of air PER MINUTE (at takeoff). WOW businessinsider.com/some-unbelieva…
So, those are some serious air movers! Swap those big 'ol boys for the 20" box fans, and we'd need... like 4 million jet engines to clear WA in 1 day. Huh.
Jets burn like... 1500 gal of fuel per hour (at cruise), so running those engines for 1 day would burn ~1.6e11 gallons of fuel. That's about 10 years worth of the US annual jet fuel consumption. statista.com/statistics/197…
And super bad news here. If you burned that amount of jet fuel, you'd produce something like 3.2 trillion lbs of CO2, which is equiv. to 12 days of worldwide CO2 production.
The air would probably *not* be great then...
Well, maybe WA is just too big, & rich Seattle should look out for itself. Let's just clear the Seattle metropolitan area, a meager 5872 sq mi (about 12x smaller than WA). We'd need 298 million fans, or 372 thousand jets.
OK, we get it. The numbers are absurdly large. What is the point? 2 things: 1) to emphasize the scale of energy at play. You can't reroute a hurricane, or move a city's worth of smoke. As w/ climate change, the problem is HUGE, actions by individual ppl aren't the solution
But relatedly, despite the laughable volumes, etc, consider how reasonable these energy scales actually are! 10yrs of jet fuel use, 12 days of CO2 production. 3 months of power for WA, 1/2 the Tsar Bomba...
We DO change the climate w/ the cumulative impact of our lives
2) Our intuition doesn't prepare us for the real scale of the physical world, so people are easily tricked or duped. Your brain can't fathom a trillion of anything (gal of fuel or $ spent), & this is one way fake news & misinformation spreads.
and collective action *IS* needed to solve these big problems (climate, fascism, healthcare...), but it requires governments & laws & systemic changes. Some Facebook group is prob not a super robust source of information on the scale of problems we're facing.
Don't get mad at your neighbors for not pointing their boxfans north tonight, be mad that the alarm was rung decades ago & we've done little to nothing to address it. Get FURIOUS that our "leaders" deny the problems even exist.
/🧵
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You don't need to read it, but I need to write it.
1) we need clear & enforced codes of professional conduct. If you harass a student, you should lose your job. I have friends who have been harassed AND friends who have lost their jobs for harassing. I have no stomach for people (esp. men) who treat people so poorly.
I know people who have been harmed by G. Marcy and other harassers. I believe them. I know we need to support them, with our words and deeds, and make sure more people aren't harmed.
It’s Friday movie night, kids get to choose… so we’re on probably the 20th viewing of *shudder* the Paw Patrol Movie. AND I HAVE SOME THOUGHTS 1/
There’s so much to ponder about the Adventure Bay Universe… the perineal favorite Q is “Where the hell are Ryder’s parents?!”
But with today’s viewing we’re considering the logistics (and timing) of the Paw Patrol’s arrival in Adventure City 2/
They joke in the film that the ‘Patrol is funded through merchandising, which is cute. But Adventure City is a major metro area, something comparable to Philly or maybe Chicago. There’s no way this private police force operates without a gov’t contract…3/
Hot dog! Astro Twitter is fired up today about a paper on metrics & research/career "impact"! I don't approve of the premise, method, or conclusions of this paper (also, these metrics as a "predictor"?! lol), but here's my 2 thoughts...
1) I've never seen any evidence that astronomers have skill at picking the "best" people for anything (jobs, grants, etc). I've 🧵'd about this, @astrogrant has write ups. *maybe* we can sort applications into a few meaningful piles
2) every job/position search & grant proposal panel I've seen uses some kind of "metrics" to rank applications. Sometimes as an initial pass, sometimes just the shortlist.
But also every search uses feelings, ppl advocating for applications/proposals to jump the ranking
Funny fact: when you're trying for that output PR on @onepeloton, you're *NOT* chasing your previous best ride. Peloton takes your best total output (in kJ) & updates it evenly spaced throughout. Here I jotted down my PR output every 10sec over a 5min ride (pink line)
The blue line is a fake representation of what the output might have actually been for that PR (Personal Record, aka Personal Best/PB) ride, slowly warming up, & then taking a break at the end (many rides have a warmup/cooldown built in)
I don't know for sure why this is the way they do it... maybe its just a simplicity/storage thing? Bike only has like 16gb of storage I think. But the ride Output data is *small* compared to the images/data that must be cached!
It's perhaps a small thing, but @JoeBiden doesn't use a Sharpie to write. I find that comforting. Nobody serious about communicating or ideas uses a sharpie to take notes in a meeting
This looks like a @officialuniball pen, maybe from the Vision line?
No @Sharpie hate here - they're my go-to for lots of jobs in the shop or around the house! @hankgreen, certainly someone who cares about ideas and communication, recently said they're the best for signing books.
But you're not taking notes on complex global issues w/ a Sharpie
What am I on about? 3 reminders: 1. Trump signs official docs w/ a Sharpie. Gauche, but for someone in a ill-fitting suit and trucker cap, fine. 2. He's used a Sharpie to "edit" a Hurricane Dorian map latimes.com/politics/story…
Free sitcom idea: it’s like Parks and Rec, but it’s the company who “lost” the bidding war and now has to build the Trump Presidential Library
“Lost” b/c Trump is a real estate developer, so of course he’ll put a bid in to build his own library to try and enrich himself further. But he’s really a pretend developer, and so hires the company that lost the bid to secretly do it anyway but for less $
so Trump's pocketing 1/2 the $, trying to get the Co to build it cheap, yet a golden palace. The Co is purposely mocking stuff they know he'll hate (pics of actual libraries), trying to run the clock out on their contract. They all get food poisoning from Trump Steaks in ep 3.